Several Things You're Not Looking For
by Tozette
Summary: In which there are almost-certainly-forbidden jutsu, Itachi is trying to have a peaceful afterlife, Sasuke loses his mind (probably), Tsunade is out of sake and being Hokage is the worst job ever. (Occasional horror themes. Silliness now continues with a second chapter about Sasuke learning to... adjust.)
1. Chapter 1

Being Hokage was the worst job _ever_. There was paperwork and everybody wanted to know where you were all the time and you could never just wrack up gambling debts and then skip town because you had to be back by Friday morning for another agonising meeting with the village council.

And _everybody_ brought their problems to you.

Tsunade was hungover. Shizune was unsympathetic. Naruto was _loud_.

Sakura looked unhappy.

So of _course_ it had to be about Sasuke.

Tsunade scowled. "Three years with Orochimaru, four years back in Konoha, eighteen months in interrogation, six months under house arrest, twelve B-rank missions, two A-ranks -"

"- and one C-rank -" Naruto reminded her helpfully.

"-we're not talking about that," said Sakura in a tone that meant that they'd _better_ not be talking about that.

Tsunade went on as though she'd never heard them: "-and he snaps while he's on leave?"

"Maa... I don't know if you'd say he's _snapped_, exactly," Kakashi said cautiously.

Tsunade looked at the clipboard Sakura had handed to her. "It says here you've had him committed involuntarily," she said slowly.

Naruto and Sakura shared an anxious look.

At least he couldn't have gone crazy and killed everybody, Tsunade thought. If that had happened, she'd have known a lot sooner. There'd be more screaming. More blood. _Somebody_ would have called her to the hospital.

"He's been... acting strange," Sakura hedged.

"Strange," repeated Tsunade, examining the clipboard. More than his mental state, which seemed - not bad, according to the psych report, but certainly not _usual_ for Sasuke - his vitals were all wrong. His admitting psychiatrist had written his heart rate as_ twenty beats per minute_, which was surely a mistake. How did an idiot like that complete his residency? "Strange how?"

Sakura looked a bit puzzled. "Withdrawn. Sulky. Aggressive."

Tsunade lowered the report and eyed her student. "And?" she demanded.

Sakura winced, because, well, yeah.

"He's forgetting things!" Naruto said loudly. "Stuff we did only a couple weeks ago! He didn't know where Ichiraku was!"

"He hasn't insulted any of us in twelve days," Sakura said.

Tsunade blinked.

"Not even Naruto," she added solemnly. Naruto seemed to deflate a little.

"And you thought this was sufficient to have him committed?" she asked, eyeing Kakashi. It had to be Kakashi - if it was involuntary, it needed to be signed off by his squad captain and a certified medic. The medic, obviously, was Sakura...

"Maa," said Kakashi, scratching the back of his neck. "Well."

She had the sinking feeling she wasn't going to get anything more out of him.

Tsunade rubbed her forehead and wondered if she'd gone through her entire stash of emergency sake last night.

(She had. Every day was an emergency when you were the Hokage.)

* * *

The psychiatric hospital for ninja had sacrificed beauty for security and was thus a very ugly building. Its foundations were deep and its rooms were windowless. Thick black seals crawled along the walls and over cell doors - the lucky ones, anyway. Some cells did not have doors.

Sasuke was in a cell with a door, which was a good sign.

Unfortunately, nothing on the report had been a mistake, which was _not_ a good sign.

According to the nurse assigned to him, he'd spent most of his time either asleep, or feigning very well. "No, no trouble at all," she said with a blend of puzzlement and relief. "He's very calm. He hasn't even raised his voice."

Tsunade took the tapes of his assessment from her to watch.

In front of a glowing television in a lightless room, she and one of the psychiatrists watched on film as Sasuke answered every question politely but laconically, said he enjoyed his missions, was content in Konoha, and was not unhappy to be placed on leave. He was quiet but _civil_.

She could see why Sakura and Naruto were so worried.

"We're sure it's not a genjutsu," she said again.

The psychiatrist nodded and made an affirmative noise, adjusting the forehead protector around his biceps. Ieyasu was a tall man, and had come to the psychiatric hospital straight out of a stint under Ibiki in T&I. He knew better than to let an illusion slip past him.

Tsunade grunted sourly. "Ninjutsu? Poison?"

Ieyasu shook his head. "Hyuuga-sensei gave him the all clear - coils are in good condition, chakra levels stable, a few blips around the back of the skull, the frontal lobe, the ocular nerves -" he shrugged at this and Tsunade nodded. The Sharingan was even harder on the brain than it was on the body, and Sasuke did tend to abuse his. "- But nothing indicating mind-altering jutsu. Toxicology came back clean, but they're running some additional tests..."

Tsunade sighed. "There are some chemicals the body produces naturally that can account for altered moods and forgetfulness," she mused. "They wouldn't necessarily be looking for those on a toxicology screen."

"Mmm," he agreed, scribbling something. "He didn't know what the camera was," Ieyasu said, scratching his chin.

"Episodic and semantic memory, then... and the physical symptoms."

The physical symptoms were, frankly, the most boggling. His heart was beating almost twenty times a minute, his temperature was sitting pretty at about twenty nine degrees and his metabolic rate had plummeted. Perversely, his chakra tests were coming out better than they had in months - chronic chakra exhaustion being the reason he'd been signed off on leave in the first place.

Tsunade found herself eyeing Sasuke's blank face, frozen on the paused screen. His skin looked waxy, and his black eyes seemed terribly dull.

"Have you given him anything?"

"No," he said.

She eyed him.

Ieyasu shrugged. "His physical symptoms are messed up, but he's coherent, responsive, rational. His motor skills are fine. He's not in pain," he shrugged again. "Honestly, if I hadn't read that," he tapped the reports in front of them, "I'd be letting him go. He's confused, but he doesn't need to be institutionalised."

Tsunade scowled. She was beginning to wish the boy had had a violent psychotic episode. They'd have known how to handle that. Violent psychoses were practically a mainstay of the Uchiha bloodline at this point. And not, technically speaking, uncommon among ninja anyway.

They resumed the tape, streaming sickly shadows and moving lights against the walls once more. On screen, Sasuke never blinked.

Tsunade blew out her cheeks in a huge sigh. It couldn't just be _simple_, could it?

"I suppose we'll have to investigate," she said. Then she snorted softly. "It's just as well. I'll have to give them something constructive to do."

* * *

Sasuke's nearest neighbours were actually civilians, which immediately put a damper on Sakura's hopes of getting anything out of them. Civilians, as a rule - and she meant this with every due respect to her own parents - were simply not very observant.

Naruto was rubbing the lump on his head as they approached the door of the elderly lady who lived next to Sasuke's house. He mumbled petulantly to himself, and Sakura felt her pasted-on smile become just a little more fixed.

She turned a gimlet eye upon him. Then she reached one hand up and knocked upon the door.

He swallowed and fell silent.

The door swung open.

Sakura clasped her hands behind her back and smiled sweetly at the old lady. "Good afternoon! We're investigating a matter for the Hokage's office," she said brightly. "Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?"

Tanaka-san, as it turned out, did not mind at all. There was no end to the things she wanted to share about Sasuke's habits.

"And there's this awful clattering and thumping inside his house every day he's home," she said fretfully once the ninja were seated at her kitchen table, upon which sat a solitary daffodil in a tiny vase.

Naruto was looking at her like he was waiting for her to say something weird was going on, so Sakura picked up the slack. "A-aa... Is that so?" she asked politely.

Tanaka-san turned her huge dark eyes on Sakura then. "I can hear him pacing at all hours," she went on, shaking her head, "I don't think he sleeps at all some nights. Sometimes I think I can hear him talking to himself."

"Um, about anything in particular?"

She looked a little frightened. "Vengeance," she said, wringing her hands.

"A-ahh," said Sakura again, trading a glance with Naruto. He looked pleased to hear about Sasuke doing something so normal.

"But it's when you _can't_ hear him that it's the worst," she burst out suddenly, loudly. Her hands fluttered in the air like huge deranged moths. "I get up of a morning and I can _see_ where he's been outside, taking out his unholy aggression on those poor trees -"

Well, the trees in Sasuke's back yard did look a little... abused. Some of them looked like he'd whittled their trunks to a dangerous thinness with relentless strikes.

Still, it had to be better that it was trees and not civilians, surely.

"And he's quiet as a mouse about it! It's not _natural_," Tanaka-san was saying.

"Right, right," Naruto interrupted finally, thumping one hand on the table and making the daffodil shudder in its vase. "But has he been doing anything _weird_?"

Tanaka-san looked as though she was about to have a stroke.

That, Sakura thought, was the crux of it. Pacing around, sleepless and muttering, was - well, it wasn't good, but it did fall within the bounds of normal Sasuke behaviour.

She cleared her throat gently. "Tanaka-san," she tried, drawing the old woman's attention back to her. "In the last few weeks, have you noticed anything that's, ah, changed?"

Tanaka-san frowned. "Not really," she said slowly. "No, he's been very quiet, actually." Her dark eyes sharpened. "You said he was in prison?"

"Hospital," Sakura said with a fixed, twitching smile.

"Pity," said the old woman.

Naruto's eyebrows lowered dangerously and he opened his mouth. Sakura kicked him pre-emptively beneath the table. He jumped and rubbed his shin. "Sakura-chan..." he whimpered.

"Nothing else?" Sakura prompted hopefully.

"Well, now that you mention it," said Tanaka-san, "there was this horrible smell."

Naruto looked back up. "Eh?" he said, scratching the back of his neck. "Smell? Are you saying Sasuke stinks? Because -" he jerked. "Ahh...!" he said, sweating.

"Please go on," Sakura said, grinding her heel mercilessly into his toes. If he'd only _shut up_ for the next few minutes, she thought hopefully, they might be able to get out unscathed...

"Honestly, I thought a rat had gone and died inside one of the walls. For two days! I was on the verge of calling somebody to look into it, but, well. I suppose Uchiha-san must have gotten rid of it..."

A dead animal? Sakura frowned. "And this was...?"

"Oh," said Tanaka-san, tapping her chin thoughtfully. "Probably two weeks ago? Yes, I remember writing in my diary to remind me to call somebody... two weeks ago." She nodded.

"Ne, Baa-chan -"

Sakura grabbed Naruto by the tie of his hitae-ate and yanked, cutting him off. "Well, thank you," she said, bowing abruptly. "We'll be on our way."

"Sakura-chan," he whined as she tugged him out the old lady's door.

* * *

Sasuke's house wasn't very pretty or in a very nice location in the village, but it was quiet and defensible, which seemed to have been the key factors in his decision when he finally got off probation and moved in there.

"Can you smell anything?" Sakura asked, sniffing the air as they approached. Sasuke had obviously left his garden to grow however it wanted to - all the better to hide traps in - and it was shaggy and unkempt.

There was a patch of barren earth and a mound of dirt heaped up on one side of the house though, and Sakura wondered what it was for. New jutsu, perhaps.

Naruto inhaled deeply. "Maybe a little?" he said, scrunching up his nose. "Not like a dead rat, though," he admitted. "More like compost."

Sakura breathed in deeply again, but she still couldn't catch anything. Probably Naruto's nose was a little better than hers. "I can't smell anything at all."

"Maybe it's just a coincidence," Naruto said slowly, examining the house closely. "Do you reckon he's got traps set up in there?"

Sakura eyed the house mistrustfully. "Well," she said. "It's Sasuke-kun..."

* * *

There were no traps inside the house.

"I bet there's one just waiting for us," Naruto said distrustfully, looking around with his jaw clenched. "Bastard."

Sakura kind of agreed. After a few cautious steps down the corridor she put her hands into a seal, flared her chakra wildly and snapped "Kai!"

Nothing happened.

"Huh," said Naruto.

"I don't like this," she said.

* * *

They did not let their guards down, creeping steadily into the depths of the house, comparing information and stopping to perform a dispel for genjutsu every so often. Just, you know, in case.

Sakura could definitely see what old Tanaka-san had meant by 'awful clattering and thumping.' It seemed as though Sasuke had taken his ownership of the house as full license to use the walls for random target practice.

She passed a large fly, dead and dehydrated, pinned to the wall with a senbon needle. Charming.

Honestly, twelve year old Sakura would have been completely mortified at the state of Sasuke's house. There were books and files and bits of paper - receipts, records, copies of old declassified mission reports - flung everywhere, two dishes with food still caked on them languishing in the sink, a torn shirt thrown carelessly over the back of a chair...

He wasn't quite as bad as Naruto, she reflected.

But, well, _boys_.

They combed the house for traps on the initial run through but they found that the only places so protected were the windows and the back door. That struck Sakura as distinctly weird and a little bit worrying, but she didn't say it aloud. She didn't have to. One look at Naruto's face told her he knew, too.

The bedroom revealed very little. There was a scattering of half-repaired equipment (which looked like he'd gotten partly done and forgotten about it entirely), dirty clothes strewn on the floor, another few dead flies lingering here and there. An old teacup. Three history books, which was unexpected - when Sasuke read, it was usually old ninjutsu scrolls or for a mission.

Sakura idly flipped over one book, examining the cover. It was a history of the war and the role of the Yondaime Hokage. "Guess he's brushing up on the Academy basics," she said dubiously.

"Well, he forgot where Ichiraku was," Naruto said, sounding offended as he rifled through Sasuke's drawers. "He probably forgot other important stuff, too."

Sakura put the book back down. She didn't bother pointing out to Naruto that Ichiraku Ramen was hardly the most important location in the village.

"There's nothing here," Naruto said at last, and Sakura had to agree with him. If Sasuke was hiding something in here, he was hiding it very well beneath the dust and books and random ninja equipment and general filthy boy-mess.

The last room they checked was the study, which smelled like rust and old paper. There was a huge, fancy scroll with trailing tassells spread across the desk. Sakura couldn't read the code, but she did recognise the fan printed on it.

Anybody could have recognised the fan printed on it, because of course the Uchiha clan had to print it on everything they'd ever come into contact with on the off chance that somebody might forget how important they were.

It really didn't seem like Sasuke to leave clan documents just laying around, though.

She flipped through the other mess around the room. There was a haphazard tower of dog-eared ninjutsu reference texts - hardly unusual - with notes shoved between pages and written in handwriting so blotted and scratchy she actually couldn't make it out. In one corner there was also a heavy sheet of canvas piled up, not folded, covered in dry, loose dirt of some kind. There was a broken bit of pottery on the desk, a pile of old clan records on the floor...

She very nearly trod in a pile of ashes on the floor, and sighed, thinking of Sasuke losing his temper and setting some poor old scroll on fire in a fit of pique.

"Ink," said Naruto, sounding puzzled, and squinting at a piece of paper.

"It's a study," Sakura rolled her eyes. "Just because you never write anything -"

"No, look," he shoved the scrap of paper under her nose.

Sakura frowned. "That's a lot of ink," she said slowly. What could Sasuke have possibly wanted with litres and litres of ink?

She glanced down at the total and found that it certainly hadn't been on sale at the time. Besides, Sasuke didn't care enough about money to do something sensible like buying things in bulk when they were on sale.

Sakura rubbed her nose thoughtfully. "Fuuinjutsu?"

"Must be," Naruto said. "He'd need an awful lot of space for something that big..."

"He wouldn't practice on _himself_ without telling somebody," Sakura said. Then she paused. "Would he?"

"I dunno. Bastard's awfully proud..."

She rubbed her hands across her eyes. "Yeah," she said, scowling, "He really is. If it's a seal on himself, they should have picked it up at the hospital," she decided, ignoring the way they were both skirting around the word "asylum". "And either way, there has to be enough space for him to use all that ink. So, obviously not in this house."

"There aren't a lot of places you can go to do something that big without people seeing you," Naruto said slowly. "Hey, hey, Sakura," he said suddenly, "this is from the Uchiha clan, right?" he waved the huge tasselled scroll at her.

She nodded, eyeing the heavy thing. It looked important. She wished she knew the code.

"The Uchiha place is still empty, right?"

She nodded again. Apparently nobody had wanted to move in after the massacre. She wasn't afraid of ghosts or old blood stains, but she didn't really blame anybody for not moving right in.

"I bet that's where he went!" Naruto was halfway out the door before Sakura had reacted, trailing the tasselled edge of that priceless scroll after him.

"Naruto! Wait, Naruto!" She ran after him.

* * *

The Uchiha compound was sturdily built but poorly maintained, and once the pair had vaulted over the high walls they saw that it was in a profound state of disrepair.

Also a lot of it was in ashes.

What wasn't in ashes was pretty smoke-damaged.

"Guess Sasuke got busy," said Naruto, resting his arms behind his head. He seemed pretty indifferent to the mess itself.

Sakura wrinkled her nose a little. "I hope we can still tell which is the clan head's house,"' she sighed. If twelve year old Sakura would have been mortified about the house Sasuke lived in, she was probably off catatonic somewhere at the state of the compound.

It wasn't necessarily easy, but they did find the correct house eventually. Then they broke in.

...Sort of.

* * *

"Why would anybody put so many traps in one house?" Naruto grouched as another shadow clone disappeared inside in a wisp of smoke. "Didn't they have kids in there?"

"Either Sasuke did them after... or, I guess they were pretty paranoid," Sakura shrugged. They were waiting just outside rather impatiently while Naruto's army of clones triggered every trap they could find. It was fast, but _noisy_.

Naruto muttered something about paranoia being genetic, which made Sakura's lips twitch... but which also brought her back to thinking about Sasuke tucked up somewhere in the asylum. "Hey, Naruto," she said after a second.

"Yeah?" he looked over at her, eyes flat and serious for a moment.

"It's not just me, right?"

"Eh?"

"Something here... doesn't feel right."

"It's not just you," he said after a second's pause.

Somewhere in the house, another clone went _bamph_!

"Don't worry, Sakura. We'll get him back."

It was such a familiar phrase she almost laughed. "We'd better."

The inside of the house was pretty depressing. There was little light, and what there was seemed grey and ugly. Naruto's clones had kicked up plenty of dust, which filled the air and spun distractingly in the light. Something had evidently colonised the empty spaces once the residents had all been murdered, because Sakura could hear the scrape of tiny claws in the walls - something small and frightened fleeing from their footsteps.

Then there were places where Uchiha blood had been left to soak into the wood for too long. Sakura toed one stain gently. No amount of scrubbing was going to make that clean.

No amount of scrubbing was going to make any of this clean.

She wondered for a second if maybe Sasuke hadn't had the right idea in setting half of it on fire.

"Come on," said Naruto, sounding a little subdued but very determined. Sakura nodded. Such thoughts were unproductive.

* * *

The found the seals, but they raised more questions than they really answered.

The Uchiha, like many of the big clans, were eager to protect the secrets of their bloodline from prying medical examiners. They cremated their dead. Ashes were stored in a family shrine and it was in this cavernous room that Naruto and Sakura found what had been done with all of the ink.

"Um," said Naruto.

"Uh," said Sakura.

It was a _lot_ of ink. Scrawled, jagged symbols trailed from a central circle across the whole broad floor and over the walls, crawling here and there over onto the roof. They also didn't look like any fuuinjutsu she'd ever see before. She looked at Naruto - Jiraiya was his teacher, after all, and had made a broader study of these techniques than Tsunade - but he looked equally puzzled.

"Do these even go together?" he wondered loudly, leaning down to squint at some particularly incongruous expression in the ink. Then he sniffed. "Can you smell that?"

Sakura sniffed. "Blood?"

"In the ink," Naruto nodded, brows furrowing. "What would you use that for?" he muttered, crouching down and rubbing his chin.

He looked deep in thought, but Sakura had her suspicions.

"Like a summoning scroll?" she prompted.

He sprang back to his feet. "Hey, yeah, _exactly_ like a summoning scroll!" He stopped. "I wonder what the bastard was trying to summon? If it was an animal summons he'd have made a contract like anyone else."

They debated it back and forth for a few minutes but in the end neither of them had the expertise or experience to make an accurate judgement of what the huge seal might actually be doing.

They looked around a little, but other than a dusty hole where one of the urns of ashes should have been kept, they didn't see anything obviously out of place.

"Although it's hard to tell, really," Sakura said to Naruto a little while later, setting her bowl aside and watching him inhale a third serving of Ichiraku's finest. "What with how the clones triggered all the traps, and then half of that stuff must have been broken in the massacre, and the general wear and tear..."

Naruto made a garbled noise that she supposed was meant to be conversation.

She took the bowl off him.

He made a sad whimpering noise, eyes wide and huge and blue, reaching helplessly for his ramen.

"Na-ru-to," she said dangerously, holding it away, "are you listening to me?"

"I'm listening, but I can't fix any of that stuff. Baa-chan will know what to do," he said, taking the opportunity to snatch the bowl back to her. He cuddled it against his chest for a second, and cooed gently to the noodles before he went back to stuffing his face.

Sakura propped her chin on her fist and wished she was as confident as he was.

* * *

_Elsewhere: _

Itachi's afterlife wasn't an idyllic reunion with his family. That was just as well, because there were a few things he didn't really think he wanted to explain to them anyway.

No, his afterlife was basically peaceful, filled with dreamlike streets, endless daylight, on and off drizzling from the sky above and the occasional tea shop. He received the odd visit from people he'd known in life - usually short-term acquaintances of no note whatsoever, all of who were just as surprised to see him as he was to see them but so much worse at hiding it - but for the most part it was a solitary sort of thing.

That was all right. Itachi was, frankly, a solitary sort of person.

So it was with some surprise that he looked up one day from a steaming cup of tea and a plate of skewered rice dumplings to see Sasuke staring at him from across the table.

He was early twenties, perhaps the same age Itachi had been when he'd died, and glowering at - nothing, Itachi suspected. Or everything.

On the tail end of that thought he wondered if Sasuke was seeing the same reality he was. The afterlife was funny like that. He took a sip of his tea, watching his little brother through its steam.

Sasuke watched him back. The tightness around his mouth softened a little, and Itachi wondered if that was what it meant to be forgiven.

"You're dead," he said, because sometimes it paid to state the obvious.

"Not... exactly," Sasuke hedged.

Itachi watched him.

There was a long silence.

Sasuke was stubborn and proud. Itachi waited, watching him, still and expressionless as a rock.

"It's complicated," Sasuke admitted with a sort of grumpy uncertainty.

Itachi took another sip. He had literally all the time in the world. He could wait all day, calm and steady, for Sasuke to find the words.

Eventually, he did, and slowly, with long pauses, Itachi began to understand exactly what had gone wrong.

"Foolish little brother," he sighed, setting his cup down.

* * *

Tsunade did not seem thrilled to receive their report. To be fair, any report containing the phrases, "unknown suspicious fuuinjutsu," "old clan documents," and "missing Uchiha remains," was indicative of a disaster just waiting for a place to happen.

(She might, in fact, have suspected Orochimaru's involvement - missing Uchiha remains and new suspect jutsu did seem very characteristic of his scheming - but recent Intel reports had him stirring up trouble in Yugakure, which was blessedly all the way across Wind and more than a week away even at a dead sprint.)

Naruto and Sakura were looking at her hopefully, as though some part of their report might enable her to pull a rabbit out of her ugly triangular hat. She opened her mouth to tell them she had no idea, but she was rather fortunately interrupted by the arrival of a messenger.

She was admitted immediately and dropped to one knee. "Hokage-sama! From the psychiatric hospital." She passed across a scroll.

Under the watchful eyes of Naruto and Sakura, Tsunade examined the writing. "The report says that Uchiha snapped and became violent when they tried to examine his head by hand," she summarised.

Tsunade clicked her tongue against her teeth.

She tapped her fingertips on the edge of her desk for a second. "Sakura," she said finally. "Uchiha's been put through a battery of blood, physical, chakra and psychiatric tests since he was admitted. How would a physical examination of his head reveal anything new?"

Sakura frowned. "I don't..."

She met Tsunade's dark eyes, thinking furiously. There was a long moment's silence.

Then her eyes narrowed. "You can hide a seal under a person's hair. Depending on what it does, it might not show up in any of the other examinations."

"Very good," said Tsunade.

"Let's go."

* * *

Ieyasu-sensei looked weary when they found him at the psychiatric hospital, sitting alone in a dark room staring at ongoing security footage of Uchiha Sasuke.

"He's asleep," Naruto said to him.

"Yep," said Ieyasu, glancing sideways at Naruto.

"You shouldn't have sedated him," Tsunade muttered, reading through a clipboard of notes and reports.

"He was going to get someone killed," said Ieyasu bluntly.

"His vitals... he should be dead," she said back, just as bluntly, ignoring the sudden alarm from Sakura and Naruto.

"Hey, hey -" Naruto interrupted, waving his arms. "Are you saying Sasuke's gonna _die_?"

"Not if we can help it," said Tsunade, still examining the notes the other doctors had taken. "Is our equipment faulty?"

Ieyasu shook his head. "We've tested it."

She grunted. "This is ridiculous."

"I know," said Ieyasu. "Hyuuga-sensei says his chakra system hasn't even changed in response to the sedative."

"That's impossible," said Sakura.

"Hey, hey," Naruto nudged her. "What does that mean?"

Sakura sighed. "Your chakra system is interdependent with all of the other systems in your body. It changes to compensate for losses - for example, a person with a weak heart will find that their chakra system makes changes over time to bolster their heart. Or, if a person loses a kidney, they find that the flow of their chakra changes to help the remaining one grow bigger to do more of the work. When a person's sedated, respiration, heart rate, blood pressure - all of these things get lowered. Sasuke's chakra system should be adapting to bolster them and return him to homeostasis - that's why ninja, with our more developed coils, are usually faster to recover."

Naruto squinted at her.

"Sakura's right," said Tsunade pensively. "In layman's terms, what's happening here is impossible. His chakra system _cannot_ be independent. It doesn't work that way, nobody would be able to use ninjutsu," she said, scrubbing a hand through her hair.

Ieyasu shrugged. "It's happening. It could be part of his bloodline, for all I know... Hokage-sama, I have to tell you, I haven't seen anything like this before. Have you-?"

"It's not part of his bloodline," she said firmly, "or it would be on the books. Even a clan as paranoid as the Uchiha had to get medical attention. ANBU medics, at least, would know about it. It's nothing I've seen before, either." She shook her head. "I've examined the research notes left behind by Yakushi Kabuto and Orochimaru, but neither has anything resembling this... ah," she said, leaning forward.

On screen, Sasuke was waking.

"You've got to be kidding me," said Ieyasu, scowling at his own notes. "He should have been out for _hours_, even if his metabolic rate was normal. I don't -" he flipped pages, looking crankier by the minute.

"Did you get a chance to have a look at his head?" Sakura asked, watching as the small Sasuke on the screen blinked awake and looked warily around.

Ieyasu grunted. "We did, but..." he picked up a final sheet of paper and handed it to Tsunade.

She frowned down at the symbol. "That's it? Just 'live'?"

Ieyasu shrugged.

"Gas him again," she decided abruptly. "I need to get a closer look at that seal. And send somebody to get Kakashi - _now_, instead of in three hours time. There might be something the Sharingan can see that we can't."

"Hokage-sama, weren't you just saying that we shouldn't have sedated him in the first place?" Ieyasu asked.

"Obviously it's not hurting him," she shot back, scraping her chair back and sweeping out the door.

* * *

"I didn't come to you," Sasuke said flatly. "I just ended up here."

Itachi looked at him thoughtfully. His little brother was painfully transparent for a ninja. It was obvious he didn't know what to say to Itachi, how to act. That split-second softening had given way to frustrated confusion and, Itachi suspected, would soon turn to resentment.

"Aa," he said, contemplating the workings of Sasuke's mind. Itachi watched the steam rise from his tea, feeling really rather peaceful. "If you're not dead," he said at last, as Sasuke's scowling threatened to turn into glowering, "then it should be a simple matter to get back. There's a puddle." He drained his tea and set it on the table, leaving it for the ghostly staff.

"A puddle," Sasuke repeated. Sneering was something that seemed to come naturally to him.

"You shouldn't scoff, otouto," said Itachi serenely, leading him out of the teashop and into the rain. Sasuke would follow, eventually, because he had no choice. He never had, really. "It's unattractive."

Sasuke sputtered.

* * *

Kakashi was fifteen minutes late, which Tsunade decided not to get too upset about. He could have taken hours, after all.

Sasuke was deeply asleep, although his chakra seemed entirely unaffected by the newest dose of sedative. They'd strapped him to the bed for extra security.

Sakura and Naruto were not allowed to go down to the cell and cause a ruckus that might upset the other patients - or, rather, Naruto wasn't allowed to and Sakura was required to keep an eye on Naruto - so they were left to watch on the security feed while Kakashi examined the seal on Sasuke's head.

"He's gonna be so mad when he wakes up and figures out they've shaved half his head," Naruto said.

Sakura stifled an inappropriate snort of laughter. It was wrong to laugh at her teammate's suffering. Very wrong. She coughed.

The doors slammed open again, and Tsunade strode back into the observation room. "The seal is being used as an anchor to his body," she declared, thumping her hands on the table between them. "It's there to prevent a captured spirit from escaping."

"What?" Naruto and Sakura, for once, were on the same page.

Kakashi, trailing behind her, took over. "Usually a seal like that would indicate that somebody had used Sasuke-kun's body as a sacrifice to house a dead spirit -"

"Like the Edo Tensei!" Sakura interrupted.

"Maa..." Kakashi's visible eye crinkled in what was either a squint or a smile. "Sort of. Except he's not a corpse. And nobody seems to be controlling him... and the chakra patterns are nearly identical..."

"Do we have reason enough to suspect that he _isn't_ Sasuke?" Tsunade asked finally.

There was a tense silence.

"Somebody good enough to fool Hyuuga-sensei and the entire medical staff," Ieyasu qualified a drily from where he was leaning against the wall.

Naruto flapped one arm for attention. "Could it be like the Yamanakas' jutsu? The one where they take over your body and make you do stupid stuff?"

"That's one of the first things we checked for. The chakra patterns with that kind of technique are obvious - they drastically change the pathways in the head if held too long. We'd have picked it up immediately," Ieyasu said dismissively. Naruto deflated.

Tsunade, however, frowned. "They would," she said slowly, "unless they were already so close it wouldn't be noticed."

"Eh?" Naruto eyed her.

"You mean if, for instance, Inoichi-san were to use the Mind Body Switch on Yamanaka Ino," Kakashi said thoughtfully.

"But all of Sasuke's family is dead," Naruto said, rather bluntly. He looked confused.

"...and that urn of ashes was missing," said Sakura with a dawning feeling of horror.

They looked at each other.

"Get that initial scan again," Tsunade barked. "There were some irregularities around the head that were attributed to overuse of the Sharingan, but we need to check how it matches up to Sasuke's earlier scans."

Ieyasu snapped a salute and then disappeared in a rustle of leaves to do her bidding.

* * *

The scans did not match.

Oh, they showed chakra wear in all the right places for a Sharingan user, which gave them the initial problem with the results: on the assumption that there was only _one_ Uchiha out there, it seemed like an easy confirmation and hadn't been double-checked.

But once they were looking at the chakra scans - really looking at them - it was obvious that that there were discrepancies.

Tsunade looked grim.

"I knew it wasn't Sasuke," said Naruto triumphantly. "How many times has he been to Ichiraku's with us?"

Sakura nodded. "And he had all those books on recent history," she added critically. That got her thinking about the other things that had seemed out of place in his house. Broken pottery. No traps.

All those dead flies. Flies did like to hang around corpses.

And the neighbour's reports of something that smelled like decay.

"I think we're missing some details," she said, rubbing her forehead.

Tsunade made an agreeing noise.

"We might have enough to go on," said Ieyasu thoughtfully. "We know the identity of the shinobi whose remains are missing. Her record is... extensive."

"_Her_ record?" Naruto said, leaning in much too close to Ieyasu's face. The psychiatrist looked utterly unfazed by his closeness. "You're saying the person in Sasuke's body is a _girl_?"

"Aa," he agreed. "She's been dead since the time of the Shodai Hokage... but reports from that time suggest that we would be dealing with a formidable opponent, if this should go badly."

"Maa, she's drugged to the eyeballs and tied to the bed," Kakashi pointed out, not bothering to glance up from his perverted book. "I think you'll be able to manage."

"I'm glad you said that," said Tsunade, taking the files off Ieyasu and slapping them against Kakashi's chest, "since you'll be the one interviewing her."

* * *

Kakashi's interview was short and to the point. The person on the bed woke, and he walked in and said, "So, Uchiha Amaya?" and Sasuke's body jerked and went still.

And then the captive refused to say another word.

* * *

"I _knew_ it wasn't Sasuke," Naruto growled furiously from the observation room.

"I think we're all agreed that Kakashi should attend the next diplomatic excursion to Rock," Tsunade said drily, ignoring him.

"Tsunade-baachan," Naruto yelled over the tail-end of her comment, "how are we gonna get him back?"

Her eyebrow twitched, but she manfully ignored his terrible nickname and answered the question. It was a good question, after all. "If it's like the Yamanaka jutsu, he should still be in there," she said reflectively. "In theory, all we'd have to do is unseal him."

"Then let's go!" he called out, from where he was already halfway down the hall.

"Naruto!" yelled Sakura, sprinting after him. "This is a _hospital_! You can't just - _Naruto_!" her voice cracked like a whip. There was a thud and a crack and a whimper.

When Tsunade caught up, Naruto was a steaming pile and Sakura was tapping her foot, glowering at him, her hands on her hips.

"Oww," he said pitifully.

"Kids these days," mumbled Ieyasu, trailing dutifully behind his Hokage.

* * *

"There," said Itachi, pointing. It was nice to be able to see so clearly again. He'd missed it for a while there.

He reached out one hand toward the large, rather muddy puddle in the path, and let Sasuke see when his fingers hit the barrier. "A living spirit should be able to get through," he explained, stepping back.

Sasuke scowled suspiciously at him, but he did peer down into the puddle. "Is that -? That's Konoha!" He looked up.

He looked angry.

"Have you been _watching_ me?" he demanded, eyes narrowing.

Rather than answer that question, Itachi sent him sprawling face-first into the watery image of Konoha.

He fell in with a splash.

The puddle sucked him down.

"Hmm," said Itachi, watching the pattern of ripples with lazily spinning Sharingan eyes. Death sure was getting to be a nebulous, temporary sort of thing these days.

* * *

Sedating Amaya again was probably not very good for Sasuke's already-weakened body. His heart was too slow, and his respiration too unreliable. But the alternative was that she flail wildly and try to bite people when they came too close, so they gassed her again.

"Is this really standard practice in a psychiatric hospital?" Sakura asked worriedly, glancing at the other cells. Most of them were silent. She wondered if they were silent because the occupants were all actually just unconscious.

"It is in a psychiatric hospital for ninja," said Ieyasu implacably.

Sakura looked unhappy, but she didn't say anything else. Ninja, after all, were very dangerous, and precautions had to be taken for the safety of the staff.

"It should be fine now," said Ieyasu, going through the hand-seals for the door release. It opened with a hiss, allowing them all entry. Naruto went first, leaning down to exclaim over Sasuke's shaven head and the inky seal in place on his scalp.

Tsunade examined the seal closely for a few moments, then bit her thumb and drew another symbol in blood and chakra over the first.

They waited a moment, and then with a hiss, both symbols went up in smoke, sending dancing sparks into the air.

Sasuke stopped breathing. An alarm started to blare.

"WHAT DID YOU DO?" Naruto bellowed.

Tsunade ignored him, knocking him back a step in her haste to slam chakra-laden hands into Sasuke's unmoving chest - but she knew too late when she saw it.

Under her hands, the skin went fine and papery. Muscle went squishy. Bones began to disintegrate.

Eventually they were all looking at a pile of ash strapped to the bed.

"Sa... Sasuke," said Sakura, wide-eyed.

* * *

Several miles away, a mound of freshly-turned earth shuddered on the lawn of a poorly-maintained house.

There was a pulse of chakra.

Then an annoyed growling sound.

A pale, grubby hand burst from the dirt, clawing at the fresh air above. Muffled by layers of dirt, somebody spat and cursed.

Sitting quietly on her verandah next door, Tanaka-san dropped her teacup.

* * *

Sasuke hauled himself out of the dirt. Bad enough that the bitch he'd raised had managed to use their blood connection to take over his body, but the fact that she'd then left him buried in the same place he'd put her twisted body... He twitched a little.

He hadn't even expected there to _be_ a body. She'd been cremated. He should have been able to send her back to death without any of these stupid complications.

He wasn't even going to _think_ about Itachi.

It had probably been some kind of weird hallucination.

The dirt was loose and fine, and Sasuke found himself shuddering as it trickled down his hair, down his shoulders, over his neck, down his breasts...

He stopped.

Peered down.

Poked himself in one breast.

It jiggled.

Sasuke exhaled slowly.

Well.

Probably, he thought, Tsunade could come up with some way to fix this.

* * *

"So let me get this straight," she Tsunade said, staring at Uchiha... somebody... across her desk. The office was light and airy, and the ANBU guards hadn't even laughed once. They were paragons of professionalism. "You discovered that the Sharingan was passed down matrilineally, so you did some research into overcoming this as an obstacle to rebuilding your clan."

She nodded at the huge tasselled scroll that was sitting on her desk.

The girl nodded. She was petite, dark-eyed and pretty like all the Uchiha, and she'd only been about twenty two when she'd died. Restored to youth and firmly attached to Sasuke's spirit, she looked... well, a lot like Sasuke's sister.

Tsunade rubbed her forehead. She had a headache, and she hadn't yet had time to replenish her store of emergency sake. (It was still an emergency. She was still Hokage.)

"And then you used a forbidden technique to raise one of your female ancestors from her own ashes so you could get some of her biological material to complete additional research," she went on carefully.

Sasuke nodded again. He - She? No, she supposed he'd still prefer male pronouns - he didn't look as though he thought that was a little strange. They hadn't gotten him away from Orochimaru nearly soon enough, Tsunade reflected.

"Right. And then once you'd harvested the material, you... dispelled the jutsu, and she used her blood connection to you to switch your bodies, leaving you trapped in her corpse and her free to wander in your body."

Sasuke paused. "Basically," he agreed. Amaya's voice was breathy and soft like summer rain, and there didn't seem to be a damned thing Sasuke could do about it because he twitched every time he opened his mouth and heard it.

Gods only knew how Naruto must be giving him hell.

Tsunade fought off a smile. Quietly.

"And then... you wandered the world of the dead, where you ran into your brother and he kicked you through a magical puddle, and you woke up in Amaya's body."

"...Yes."

"Yes, that's what I thought your report said," she muttered. Maybe she should have started saving her emergency stash for _real_ emergencies.

"Can you fix it?" he asked flatly.

At least he was to the point.

"I'm not going to interfere with that body," she said, just as bluntly. "I don't think you realise the kind of narrow escape you've had. Your body is so much dust decorating a contaminated cell in the psychiatric hospital right now," she reminded him, ignoring his subtle flinch. "That body is now anchored as firmly to you as your own was. Re-creating the chain of events that led us here is next to impossible, and, frankly, I don't have the time or the resources to spend working on it. That body is young, strong and healthy. It even still has your own bloodline limit. Pending a full medical examination, you'll be back on the duty roster in a week."

He made a noise of protest and opened his mouth.

"No, Uchiha. You're just going to have to live with it. Dismissed." She waved a hand at him.

Sasuke got up, bowed curtly and stalked out the door.

The door slammed after him.

_Then_ the ANBU guards laughed.

(The end.)

* * *

If you had any feelings about this one in either direction, please drop me a review with some feedback. I don't write much crack, and I am usually pretty terrible at shorter fiction (when it has an actual plot, instead of just, you know, uh, pornography), so let me know what you thought...

(I'm also kind of considering doing some more short kind of cracky stories about Sasuke's adventures in Amaya's body and maybe Itachi finding a way to get through the cosmic puddle and, like, interact with living people in some silly way. So I'd like to hear any thoughts on that, if you have any...)


	2. Chapter 2

Short, hopefully amusing, silliness. In which Sasuke is trying - and mostly _failing_ - to adjust.

* * *

Sasuke was... well, he wouldn't say he was _struggling_ to adapt to life inside Uchiha Amaya's body. To say 'struggling' would imply that he was trying to adapt at all. What he was actually doing was a lot closer to avoiding any adaptation he could possibly live without. There were differences, of course, but at the end of the day a body was a body. His chakra levels were nearly identical and his Sharingan were fully developed. He was determined to ignore the rest.

Other people were... not so much.

The civilians were ...bad.

The day after Sasuke's abrupt return from the dead via cosmic puddle, the old lady who sold tomatoes at the weekend market peered at him over her juicy produce.

She took his sleeve in one hand, wrinkled folds of skin looking thin and soft against the fabric. "Dear, if you don't do something about that hair, you're never going to land a nice man," she informed him with a strange blend of disapproval and sympathy.

He just looked at her. "How much for the tomatoes?" he growled.

Amaya's voice wasn't very growly. Where Sasuke growled, she sounded like a phone sex operator.

The woman clucked at him and shook her head.

She rang up the tomatoes. That was certainly not the last of it - just the first he really noticed.

Somehow, people on the street felt like their opinions on his looks, habits, expression and life choices were suddenly their business. There was a gap-toothed wino who grinned at him and said, "You're too pretty to scowl, lady!" and a middle-aged man at the laundromat who looked him up and down and informed him, "Muscles aren't attractive on a woman."

Women his own age definitely looked at him differently. Where there had once been half-hidden, appreciative glances there were now looks of open hostility. He'd never really accounted for how disturbing the feminine art of quiet sabotage was.

A lot of civilians seemed immediately to be under the impression that he had a lot of sex and very few standards. This was extra impressive because they didn't even know who he was, but he could read lips. The word 'slut' was pretty easy to pick out.

Which was ludicrous, really.

As though he'd allow a stranger that close.

But, well, civilians didn't really matter. As far as most ninja were concerned, they were sort of like a kind of chatty furniture item: present, noisy, occasionally in the way - but not really people.

The ninja were worse, in a way.

Naruto's goading quickly became a relief in its utter normalcy, and Sasuke could deal with Sakura's half-sympathetic, half-smug glances and little smiles. Kakashi's assurances that "It's okay to be sub-par, Sasuke-chan. You're still... adjusting," given with his eye curved into an insincere little smile were irritating, but hardly intolerable.

But that was his team. There were other people.

Lee had developed wild eyes and a noticeable stammer around him for no reason Sasuke could adequately determine. Kiba, he was pretty certain, had taken to sniffing him. He could still _hear_ it, even if he didn't necessarily spin around fast enough to catch the dog-bastard at it.

Shikamaru cut one glance at him and mumbled something about how difficult and troublesome women all were.

"What," said Sasuke. It wasn't a question. There was no question to which that could possibly be the answer.

Shikamaru heaved a sigh. "It's troublesome having more women around," he said.

Sasuke punched him in the face.

Shikamaru attributed this to some inability to control his feelings. Sasuke offered to ram a kunai up his spine.

The other ninja heaved yet another sigh, cradling his bruised jaw. "This is so troublesome," he said, scowling and bored. "There's no need to get hysterical."

Sasuke twitched.

His eyes bled red.

Laughing an increasingly high-pitched and nervous laugh, Sakura took him by the elbow and hauled him away. She was stronger than him, and her grip was like a vise.

* * *

Tsunade hauled him into her office again and dumped a book, three pamphlets and a free sample pack of sanitary pads into his arms.

He eyed them very mistrustfully.

"This contains all the information on the female reproductive cycle that we teach to first year medics," she said, glowering at him. She didn't look embarrassed or humiliated, just very irritable.

She sat down in the Hokage's chair with a face like she was questioning how this could possibly be her life and what horrific mistakes she'd made to lead her here.

"Uh," said Sasuke.

She held up one hand. "If you have any questions," she said, "you can ask somebody else."

Then she examined her sake bottle thoughtfully, as though it contained the answers to existential questions as yet unasked.

That was, he supposed, his cue to leave.

The female reproductive system remained pretty much mysterious to him.

It was large. And ...complicated.

* * *

Sasuke was assigned exactly one mission outside Team Kakashi, during which a new chuunin shoved him out of the way of an oncoming attack.

"Eh," said the team leader, a fortysomething jounin with dark eyes and careless hair named Yamada, "well, he was worried about your wellbeing."

"He should have been worried about his own wellbeing," said Sasuke, who did not actually outrank the chuunin, but who could have wiped the floor with him in any fight, anywhere, with or without using his Sharingan.

"Your teammate got hurt protecting you," said Yamada severely, eyeing him and clicking his teeth. "It's traditional to say thank you."

"I don't think so," Sasuke said flatly. Amaya's voice might not have growled, but it could go hard and flat.

It was a tense and uncomfortable team that returned to the village.

The team leader told Tsunade that Sasuke was incapable of effective teamwork, and he very nearly received a citation for 'allowing his emotions to get the better of him in the field.'

"If that's a real thing you can be cited for," Sasuke said, eyes boring into the Godaime's amber ones over her huge desk, "Why isn't it on Naruto's record?"

Yamada looked at him like he was something that crawled out from under a rock.

"Mmm," said Tsunade without much commitment one way or the other. "You can go, Yamada-san."

She glanced up at Sasuke. "Nobody's going to cite you," she sighed. "Get out."

Unsatisfied but unwilling to look a gift-horse in the mouth, Sasuke left.

* * *

Some missions were weirder than others.

"No," said Sasuke, staring at Kakashi in mixed horror and defiance.

"Sasuke," he sighed, giving him a very disappointed look.

"_No_," Sasuke repeated, with emphasis.

"It's not that hard, teme," Naruto interjected cheerfully. "Just go in, bat your eyelashes, flirt a little. It's not like you have to get it on with him -"

The thought made Sasuke's face feel cold, which must have showed in the dramatic paling of his skin, because Naruto changed his tone fast. "Women do it all the time!"

Sasuke took a deep, calming breath.

It didn't really help.

Fuck it.

"Did it somehow escape you," he hissed - at Naruto, because he could, in a way he couldn't with Kakashi - "that I am _not a woman_?"

Naruto's eyes made a very unsubtle detour from his face to his chest and back.

So Sasuke punched him.

"Sasuke -" Kakashi began again when Naruto was clutching his quickly-healing nose and glowering at them through the blood on his mouth.

"No," said Sasuke. "If it's so easy, he can use that stupid perverted jutsu and do it himself," he jerked a thumb in Naruto's direction and crossed his arms over his chest.

Kakashi heaved a huge sigh. "You're being unreasonable," he informed Sasuke, which was as good as relenting.

* * *

Premenstrual stress, as it turned out, did not make Sasuke weepy or leave him craving chocolate. It did seem to damage his impulse control, though.

So he ate a kilogram of very rare beef and tried to rip Kakashi's throat out when they all met up.

With his teeth. In the middle of the mission office.

It was a very cathartic week.

* * *

"Sasuke," said Sakura finally, with the expression of a person about to really regret her next words, "you're... taping."

"Taping," he repeated.

She indicated his chest area vaguely.

He did not respond, preferring to believe that if he stared at her balefully enough she would go away and this conversation would never have happened.

Sadly Sakura was not twelve anymore. She heaved a sigh that sounded like it almost hurt. "Sasuke," she repeated, a little more firmly. "You need a sports bra."

"No," he said flatly, in clear defiance of the fact that he probably did, because he was still trying to convince himself that this was a temporary state, so temporary, he'd be a guy again in no time, really, "No, I don't."

"No," she disagreed, unbearably gently, "you really do. Come with me."

"No," he said.

"Come with me," she said, with steel in her voice, "or I'll get Tsunade-sama to help you with it. What's your preference?"

He paled.

Then, reluctantly, he grunted his assent.

Bra fittings were a particular, unique kind of humiliation.

"Don't punch anybody," Sakura had cautioned, and he'd scoffed at the time, but it was actually very difficult to remember that he wasn't supposed to hurt Konoha civilians when two very cheerful women kept grabbing his breasts unexpectedly and manhandling them into new and different bras.

"Stop squirming," one of them advised, yanking none-too-gently on the band. "Shake yourself in."

"Shake...?" He eyed her.

"Shake," she affirmed.

She mimed the action, leaning over and shimmying her boobs more comfortably into her bra. Then she straightened and beamed at him.

Was his face red? His face was red.

There actually was a jutsu that would let him sink into the floor and disappear, he recalled, but his affinity for earth-types wasn't great.

"Sasuke?" Sakura's voice called from outside somewhere. "Are you-?"

"I'm fine!" he snapped.

Sakura heaved a put-upon sigh, like he had somehow not grasped that she was trying to help him. He ground his teeth.

"Get out," he said to the saleswoman in a purring husky voice that he had fully intended should sound like a growl.

The saleswoman's smile became slightly more genuine and he hated her a little bit.

Women's undergarments were weird.

And constricting.

And he was pretty sure that there had to be a more efficient and less stupid design, somehow, but he certainly couldn't think what it might be.

He glowered at Amaya's reflection. Her boobs weren't even that big. Did she really need...?

Maybe she did.

Outside, he could hear Sakura's voice filled with laughter. "No, uh, thank you," she giggled, "I don't think that's really her thing. No, she's not... really... the lingerie type."

He scowled so much harder.

* * *

Sasuke wondered a little if it was also difficult for Sakura. Not the same way it was for him, but...

Strange men - ninja, civilians, missing-nin - flirted with Sasuke. It was almost as universal as his previous experience with young women. Men were pushier, and, in his view, not as nice-smelling or soft-skinned or attractive, but -

Well, Sakura liked men.

And they didn't seem to like her.

At least, not when she was standing next to Sasuke.

Sometimes her smile gave a definite twitch - and he didn't think she was just protecting his virtue. Because: a), she was one of the few people who had reconciled the presence of ovaries with his capacity to ram a chidori through a man's stomach and b), his virtue was pretty much negligible.

So sometimes he wondered.

But he didn't ask.

* * *

(Sai did. Even by Sakura's standards, the resulting crater was impressive.)

* * *

Sasuke came home with Naruto and Kakashi and Sakura, covered in mud and bits of debris.

"Food," said Sakura, and Sasuke grunted his agreement. He was inclined to agree with her because jerky and ration bars were a nice stopgap but a terrible diet, and they'd been living off them for a fortnight.

"Ichiraku!" Naruto crowed.

"No," said three flat voices.

"Meat," Sasuke suggested.

"Meat and vegetables," Sakura counted.

"Ramen," Naruto interjected.

They both turned on him.

Kakashi sighed into a worn copy of Icha Icha Tactics.

They did not end up at Ichiraku, although Naruto did end up with a lump on his head and a bruise on his jaw, both of which he was reliably informed he deserved. Kakashi did not deign to get involved, not least because he was still remembering that one time Sasuke had flipped and gone for his throat with his teeth.

Instead they ducked into the donburi place opposite the hospital, which saw a lot of foot traffic from shinobi and relatives during visiting hours. There was hot tea, plentiful rice, and a mix of vegetables, meats and spices to fill the stomach of any hungry ninja.

"Oh," said the lady behind the counter, peering at Sasuke with her face stuck in a mask of gentle concern, "you can use the bath room to clean up a little, if you like, dear," she suggested. "The ladies is on the left." She pointed.

Sasuke glanced at his team mates. "What," he said.

She smiled sympathetically. "A young woman always feels better when she's cleaned up." She peered more closely. "I'll bet you're a stunner under all that frightful mess."

Sasuke stared at her.

There was a short silence, in which he could sense Kakashi making an expeditious retreat.

Sakura cleared her throat loudly. Aggressively, even, one might say. She opened her mouth.

"No," said Sasuke.

He seemed to be saying that a lot lately. It was actually kind of comforting. A sharp denial: no, do not want. Nope, nope, nope.

"No," he repeated, glowering. He could feel his temper moving off at a boil, simmering up to a really fine rage.

The woman just looked confused.

He turned on his heel and stalked out.

"Is she all right?" she asked, bewildered.

"Oh," said Sakura with a saccharine smile, "She's fine. Just upset about being stuck in the uncivilised wilderness for weeks."

"Oh, dear," said the woman, with genuine concern on her face.

Muttering to herself, Sakura turned and left, too.

"Can we go to Ichiraku's now?" Naruto asked, striding quickly to catch up.

Sakura took a leaf out of Sasuke's book and just grunted her assent.

* * *

They found Sasuke and dragged him back to Ichiraku's with them. He was still hungry, so he didn't really put up much of a fight.

Teuchi-san greeted them cheerfully, by name, and commented that it looked as though they'd had a rough mission.

"Piece of cake," Naurto said, beaming, and the man smiled cheerfully as he set their bowls down.

"Sasuke does look, you know, more delicate," Naruto said around a mouth full of noodles.

Sasuke's head snapped up, eyes sharp and swirling red, but Sakura beat him to it: "Sasuke? Delicate?" she snorted.

"I'm not saying he is," Naruto rolled his eyes. "But, you know, you can see why people keep thinking that."

"No," said Sasuke. "I can't. I'm not much smaller than Sakura." And wasn't THAT a weird thing to have to say.

Naruto eyed him. "You're... pointy. And skinny. And pretty," he added, a little reluctantly.

"Pretty," said Sasuke and Sakura, together, and in more or less the same tone.

Naruto began to look like he'd thought better of this line of conversation. "You know what," he said after a second, wisely, "it doesn't matter."

Sasuke gave him a look that was all death and threat and temper, but returned his attention to his ramen. He was hungry. Naruto was an idiot. It wasn't worth it.

"He's not that pretty," Sakura said after a moment.

Nobody answered her.

"He's _not_."

More silence.

Sakura sulked quietly.

* * *

Yeah, so this was me with my dedication to "write more of The Natural Habitat, or Hit The Ground Running, really, I definitely will, tonight," and you can all see how well that went.

So, as I said, I wanted to add to the genderbent silliness with Sasuke, and maybe do some other dumb self-indulgent humour stuff to go along with it. This is one of those additions. I'm going to consider the story "complete" because who knows when or if I will post another, and there isn't really an overarching plot to resolve here.

This is probably pretty obviously not beta-read. I think I caught all the typos, but if you find one let me know. Comments welcome, suggestions welcome. Whatever, it's fine.

Your reviews are the light of my fridge. Hit me.


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